David Arnold Williams (born 9 September 1937) is a retired British astrochemist and Emeritus Perren Professor of Astronomy at University College London.
[1] He was born in Nottingham the son of Unitarian minister James Arnold and Frances Barbara (Begg) Williams.
He entered Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland to study mathematics, physics and chemistry and was awarded a B.Sc.
He was an assistant lecturer at the Manchester College of Science and Technology from 1963 to 1965, after which he was a research associate at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, D.C. from 1965 to 1967.
In 2009 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for Astronomy for his contributions to astronomy in the field of astrochemistry, applying it in progressive phases of star formation, from prestellar objects to protostars to the disks and planets found around young stars.